We didn't spend hours studiously poring over some reference book
before we wrote our first HTML document. You probably shouldn't,
either. HTML is simple to read and understand, and it's simple
to write, too. So let's get started without first learning a lot
of arcane rules.

To help you get that quick, satisfying start, we've included
this chapter as a brief summary of the many elements of HTML. Of
course, we've left out a lot of details and some tricks you
should know. Read the upcoming chapters to get the essentials for
becoming fluent in HTML.

Even if you are familiar with HTML, we recommend you work your way
through this chapter before tackling the rest of the book. It not only
gives you a working grasp of basic HTML and its jargon, you'll
also be more productive later, flush with the confidence that comes
from creating attractive documents in such a short time.

Use any text editor to create HTML documents, as long as it can save
your work on disk in ASCII text file format. That's because even
though HTML documents include elaborate text layout and pictures,
they're all just plain old ASCII documents themselves. A
fancier WYSIWYG editor or an HTML translator for your favorite word
processor are fine, too--although they may not support the many
nonstandard HTML features we discuss later in this book. You'll
probably end up touching up the HTML source text they produce, as
well.

While not needed to compose HTML, you should have at least one version
of a popular World Wide Web browser installed on your computer to view
your work, preferably Netscape Navigator or Microsoft's Internet
Explorer. That's because the HTML source document you compose on
your text editor doesn't look anything like what gets displayed
by a browser, even though it's the same document. Make sure what
your readers actually see is what you intended by viewing the HTML
document yourself with a browser. Besides, the popular ones are free
over the Internet. If you can't retrieve a browser copy
yourself, get a friend to give you a copy.

Also note that you don't need a connection to the Internet or
the World Wide Web to write and view your HTML documents. You may
compose and view your documents stored on a hard drive or floppy disk
that's attached to your computer. You can even navigate among
your local documents with HTML's hyperlinking capabilities
without ever being connected to the Internet, or any other network,
for that matter. In fact, we recommend that you work locally to
develop and thoroughly test your HTML documents before you share them
with others.

We strongly recommend, however, that you do get a
connection to the Internet and to the World Wide Web if you are
serious about composing your own HTML documents. You may download and
view others' interesting web pages and see how they accomplished
some interesting feature--good or bad. Learning by example is
fun, too. (Reusing others' work, on the other hand, is often
questionable, if not downright illegal.) An Internet connection is
essential if you include in your work hyperlinks to other documents on
the Internet.